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> Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Kyiv would like to end the war with Russia next year through "diplomatic means" as both countries prepare for President-elect Donald Trump's return to the White House.

> In an interview with the Ukrainian media outlet Suspilne, Zelenskyy said he is certain that the war will end "sooner" than it otherwise would have once Mr. Trump becomes president.

> The prospect of Trump returning to power in the United States next year has raised questions about the future of the conflict, as the Republican has been critical of U.S. military aid to Kyiv.

> Zelenskyy said that Ukraine "must do everything so that this war ends next year, ends through diplomatic means."

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> Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy tells Suspilne media platform that under US president-elect Donald Trump the war in Ukraine will end quicker, according to Suspilne website.

> Trump, who takes office in January, has said he’d seek a quick deal between Kyiv and Moscow.

> Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz held a phone call earlier on Friday, the first direct communication between the leaders in almost two years and discussed the war in Ukraine.

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Keir Starmer said he would defend the budget “all day long” at the Welsh Labour conference, amid protests by farmers outside the venue.

In his first address to the Welsh Labour conference since taking power, the prime minister went on to hail a “path of change” with Labour governments in Wales and Westminster.

“Make no mistake, I will defend our decisions in the budget all day long,” he said. “I will defend facing up to the harsh light of fiscal reality.

Tokyo police arrested a 65-year-old American man Wednesday on suspicion of property damage after he allegedly carved letters into the wooden pillar of a torii gate at the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward.

The suspect, identified as Steve Lee Hayes, whose address and occupation are unknown, has admitted to the allegations. He reportedly admitted that he “wrote his family members’ names.”

> Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz held a phone call Friday to discuss ways to end the war in Ukraine, according a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

> Uncertainty over support from Western allies has also been growing ahead of Donald Trump’s return to the White House next year. Germany is Ukraine’s second-biggest supporter after the US and has pledged billions of euros in additional aid.

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> [Photo: US Government] A hooded detainee imprisoned at Abu Ghraib. He is standing on a box with wires attached to his left and right hand; he was told that he would be electrocuted if he fell off the box.

> On November 12, a federal jury in Alexandria, Virginia, returned a unanimous verdict for Abu Ghraib torture victims Salah Al-Ejaili, Suhail Al Shimari and Asa’ad Al-Zuba’e, awarding each $3 million in compensation and another $11 million for punitive damages against CACI Premier Technology, Inc., a publicly traded defense contractor with annual revenues approaching $3 billion.

> The eight jurors found unanimously that late in 2003 CACI interrogators conspired “with military personnel to inflict torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment on detainees in the Abu Ghraib hard site that resulted in [each of the three men] being tortured or subjected to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.”

> Following US’s illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq based on lies about complicity in the 9/11 attacks and “weapons of mass destruction,” in April 2004, CBS News’ “60 Minutes” published graphic photos of Iraqis rounded up by the US military and incarcerated in Abu Ghraib Prison outside Bhagdad being tortured by electric shocks, held in stress positions, threatened with dogs and humiliated sexually. Many photos depict gloating US soldiers posing with victims.

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> The Israeli attack on Iran in late October destroyed an active top secret nuclear weapons research facility in Parchin, according to three U.S. officials, one current Israeli official and one former Israeli official.

> The strike — which targeted a site previously reported to be inactive — significantly damaged Iran's effort over the past year to resume nuclear weapons research, Israeli and U.S. officials said.

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> As Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake left the polling station at the Abeysingharama Temple in Maradana, Colombo, on Thursday, Sulaiman called out to him, urging him to stop and listen to his grievances. The police quickly accosted Sulaiman and asked him to leave the venue.

> Sulaiman’s hope that Dissanayake will deliver justice that his predecessors did not finds echoes across Sri Lanka, which overwhelmingly voted for the centre-left leader in presidential elections in September. Now, that hope will be tested like never before.

> Dissanayake’s National People’s Power (NPP) won a landslide majority in Thursday’s parliamentary election, securing 159 seats in a house of 225 members – representing a comfortable two-thirds majority. The main opposition, Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), under its leader Sajith Premadasa, won just 40 seats.

> According to political analyst Aruna Kulatunga, this is the first time since 1977 – when Sri Lanka changed its parliamentary system to proportional representation – that a single party has won a clear majority. This is also the first time that the incumbent president has the numbers needed to pass legislation in parliament without needing to rely on any allies or coalition partners.

> The expectations from the NPP are high. Led by Dissanayake’s Marxist-leaning Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, the NPP also includes multiple organisations, including civil society groups that came together during the 2022 protests against the government of then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was ousted from power.

> Stakes are particularly high in the north of the country where the Tamil community voted for the NPP, breaking with its pattern of voting for Tamil parties. The NPP secured a majority of the seats in the north. The north and east of the country, where the Tamil population is largely based, were the epicentres of the bloodiest battles during a three-decade civil war between the Tamil rebels and the Sri Lankan army. The war ended in 2009 when Sri Lankan armed forces decimated the Tamil armed leadership.

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Archive: [ https://archive.is/aoi5R ]

>In one of the conversations early on Oct. 7, General Gil told the prime minister that hundreds of Hamas operatives had started behaving in a way that suggested that they may be about to invade Israel, according to three officials briefed on the investigation. The timing of that call is one of the details that is said to have been changed in the official transcripts. > >The content and timing of these calls are important because they could help shape the way that Mr. Netanyahu is seen by both voters and historians. > >For more than a year, Mr. Netanyahu has denied being briefed in advance about the invasion. He has avoided setting up a state inquiry to assess the culpability of Israel’s military and political leaders, including himself.

> Sales of Chinese cars in Russia have hit fresh records after the country became the largest export destination for the Asian nation’s automakers when sanctions forced western brands to cut ties with Moscow.

> Surging in Russian sales have helped Chinese carmakers at a time when Beijing faces higher tariffs on electric vehicle exports from Washington and Brussels — while engineering a rapid change in Russian auto culture.

> Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine sparked a sharp decline in sales of vehicles from the European, Korean and Japanese carmakers that previously dominated the country’s car market.

> At the time of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, their brands made up 69 per cent of all sales, according to the Avtostat analytics agency. They now have a market share of just 8.5 per cent, while Chinese manufacturers’ share over the same period has risen from 9 per cent to 57 per cent.

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> Israeli warplanes intensified their deadly attacks on different parts of the Syrian capital Damascus, and the Southern Suburb (Dahiyeh) in the Lebanese capital Beirut on Thursday, November 14.

> The aerial attacks on Damascus targeted residential buildings in both Mazzeh and Qudsaya areas, leaving at least 15 people killed and 16 others injured, in addition to causing significant material damage to a number of buildings, according to a source in the Syrian military.

> Thursday’s airstrikes on Damascus were preceded by a series of airstrikes that targeted different parts of Syria within the last couple of weeks. On Wednesday, November 13, Israeli fighter jets struck bridges on the Orontes River and roads in Al-Qusayr area in Homs countryside, near the Syrian Lebanese borders. The airstrikes inflicted great damage on the bridges and roads, which consequently became out of service, as per a report published by the Syrian Arab News Agency SANA.

> On Sunday, November 10, Israeli warplanes targeted a residential building in the Sayyidah Zaynab area of Damascus, killing seven civilians including women and children. Previous airstrikes were launched by Israeli fighter jets on November 4, targeting a number of sites south of Damascus, resulting in material damages.

> Syria’s Foreign and Expatriates Ministry condemned the Israeli attacks in a statement issued on Thursday. “The Israeli entity’s continuation of its attacks on Syria today comes only two days after the joint Arab-Islamic summit in Riyadh issued a broad condemnation of its brutal and escalating aggression on Syrian territory, and its warning of the danger of this escalation that is ravaging the region and its regional and international repercussions,” the Ministry stated.

> The escalation of Israeli aggression and its expansion on different fronts has been increasing despite the mounting regional and international calls for a ceasefire and de-escalation, which indicates Israel’s total disregard of international law and its obligations. Israel insists on committing blatant violations of territorial integrity of sovereign states, due to the impunity it enjoys, and being given the greenlight by the United States.

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Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s leftist coalition has achieved a landslide victory in snap parliamentary elections, delivering the self-described Marxist leader a powerful mandate to fight poverty and corruption in the crisis-stricken nation.

The Election Commission of Sri Lanka said on Friday that Dissanayake’s National People’s Power (NPP) coalition secured a two-thirds majority in parliament, winning 159 of 225 seats, a huge lead on opposition alliance Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), which won 40 seats.

The Islamic Resistance in Lebanon - Hezbollah's first operation on Friday was carried out minutes after midnight, targeting the Shraga military base, the administrative headquarters of the Golani Brigade command in north Akka with a salvo of rockets.

Israeli Reserve Major General Israel Ziv, former head of the Operations Directorate, warned that "Israel will be operating on limited munitions if a settlement [with Lebanon] is not reached," adding, "Winter is approaching, and it’s not in Israel's interest to get bogged down in Lebanon."

The Israeli general noted that "Hezbollah is regaining strength, which means Israel’s leverage in any political agreement is dwindling. What Israel could achieve yesterday, it can no longer achieve today or tomorrow." Moreover, he stressed, "Netanyahu is very weak and paralyzed when it comes to the Americans."

Ziv also admitted, "Unless Hezbollah is granted certain concessions or achievements, it will have no interest in a settlement, and we won’t have anyone left to negotiate with," adding that "Naim Qassem will not declare surrender—that won’t happen, just as it didn’t happen with Hamas."

"Israel is paying a heavy price, and the battlefield won’t wait for Trump," Ziv explained, before concluding that "in three months (by the time Trump is officially inaugurated), any military gains may be lost."

> For the first time, Chinese scientists and their US collaborators have been able to precisely measure the age of volcanic eruptions on the far side of the moon.

> Previously this was only estimated through remote sensing observations.

> Two research teams led by scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, based in Beijing and Guangzhou, used radiometric dating to analyse isotope decay in basalts, a type of volcanic rock brought back to Earth by China’s Chang’e-6 mission in June.

> Their studies, published on Friday in journals Nature and Science, both found that the moon’s oldest and deepest crater on its far side was volcanically active around 2.8 billion years ago.

> In comparison, samples returned by the Apollo, Luna and Chang’e-5 missions – all from the near side – established that lunar volcanism occurred between 4 billion and 2 billion years ago.

> The Nature paper highlighted that the 2.8 billion-year age was “surprisingly young” as volcanic activities on the far side were traditionally thought to have ended much earlier. Most volcanic eruptions were associated with the near side and believed to have ceased by around 3 billion years ago.

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> Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake thanked voters on Friday for delivering his leftist coalition a landslide victory in snap parliamentary elections that repudiated establishment parties blamed for triggering an economic crisis.

> Dissanayake, a self-avowed Marxist, swept September presidential elections on a promise to combat corruption and recover stolen assets, two years after a slow-motion financial crash imposed widespread hardships on the island nation.

> His decision to immediately call polls and secure parliamentary backing for his agenda was vindicated on Friday, with his National People’s Power (NPP) coalition taking at least 159 seats in the 225-member assembly, exceeding a two-thirds majority.

> In a sign of the magnitude of support for Dissanayake, his party won the most votes in the northern district of Jaffna, dominated by the island’s minority Tamil community, for the first time since independence from Britain in 1948.

> Dissanayake, the 55-year-old son of a labourer, had been an MP for nearly 25 years and was briefly an agriculture minister but his NPP coalition held just three seats in the outgoing assembly.

> He stormed to the presidency after successfully distancing himself from successive leaders blamed for steering the country to its 2022 economic crisis.

> Portraits of communist luminaries including Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Friedrich Engels and Fidel Castro hang in Dissanayake’s office in the capital.

> Since his rise to popularity, however, he has softened some policies, saying he believes in an open economy and is not totally opposed to privatisation.

> Dissanayake had campaigned on a pledge to renegotiate a controversial US$2.9 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout secured by his predecessor.

> But since taking office, he has resolved to maintain the existing agreement with the international lender.

> The country’s main private sector lobby, the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, has tacitly supported Dissanayake and his programme.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/22512916

> November 13, 2024 > By Ramzy Baroud > Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is “Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak out”. Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

By Yasmine El-Sabawi in Washington Published date: 13 November 2024 21:22 GMT

> India and China’s progress in ironing out long-standing border tensions has sparked hopes of a revival in trade ties that could open up Chinese investments in sectors such as electric vehicles (EV) and consumer electronics.

> Earlier this month, India Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar noted that there was “some progress” in disengagement of troops from both sides of their border, saying it was a “welcome move” which “opens up the possibility that other steps could happen”.

> Ties between India and China hit one of their lowest points following a clash between troops along the disputed Himalayan border in 2020, and relations have only begun to warm with the withdrawal of soldiers on either side of the border.

> That followed an earlier agreement in October on patrolling arrangements on the border between the two countries.

> India had increased scrutiny for visa applications from Chinese citizens in the wake of the border clashes, which hurt some of India’s key manufacturing firms as stricter visa rules meant specialised engineers from China could not enter the country, leading to production losses.

> The two countries have not had any direct flights for four years, but there are signs that these could again resume following the easing of border tensions. India’s aviation minister said in September that both sides had discussed an early resumption of scheduled passenger flights.

> “We are hoping that there will be more Chinese investments, joint ventures as well as technology transfers,” said Vinod Sharma, chairman of the Confederation of Indian Industry’s National ICTE (Electronics hardware) Committee. “Secondly, we are hoping that China will allow exports from India of manufactured goods.”

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> Bangladesh’s Interim Government (IG) is suppressing garment workers engaged in protests over a series of demands, including wage increases and improved social conditions.

> The class struggle is occurring under conditions of intense political upheaval. Mass student protests, which developed into a broader uprising in July-August, forced the ouster of Prime Minister Shiek Hasina, who fled the country.

> The IG was installed by the military on August 8 and is headed by Chief Adviser Muhammed Yunus, a banker with close ties to American imperialism. Yunus’ claims to be overseeing a transition to “true democracy,” aimed at realising “social justice” after the increasingly authoritarian rule of Hasina, are belied by the brutal attacks on garment workers.

> In response to protests that have continued since September, the new government has overseen a police crackdown involving regular officers, industrial cops, the notorious Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) and army personnel.

> So far, these state forces have gunned down one protester, injured scores, carried out mass arrests and filed cases against over a thousand workers.

> A key demand of the workers is for a major pay increase, from the current monthly minimum wage of 8,000 taka ($US67) to 22,000-25,000 taka ($184-209). They are also calling for an increase to the monthly attendance bonus, the granting of annual leave, night shift pay and an extension of maternity leave for female workers.

> Other demands include the reopening of closed factories, the reinstatement of previously terminated employees, an end to harassment by management and government officials and improved workplace safety and conditions.

> From last Saturday until Tuesday, garment workers at over a dozen factories in Gazipur shut down production.

> Yunus is going beyond its purported duty of preparing national elections within three months of his installation, signaling that the IG will remain in office until 2026. An October article in the Hindu reported Yunus stating that “an election cannot be held before reforms are completed,” a reference to austerity measures demanded by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/15164960

> > He said at least once or twice daily, there were "mass casualty incidents," meaning that 10 to 20 people were killed and up to 40 seriously injured. He estimated that at least 60 percent of the people treated at these times were women and children. > > > The 62-year-old surgeon broke down three times during his testimony >

The National People's Power alliance of Sri Lanka's new President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has won a majority of seats in the Sri Lankan Parliament, and is on course to a two-thirds majority with about 62% of the vote (up from 4% in 2020). Led by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (People's Liberation Front), they campaigned on a platform of punishing corruption, renegotiating austerity policies imposed by the IMF, and uniting the country's various ethnic groups. They have also become the first Sinhala-majority party to win a district (Jaffna) in the Tamil-majority north, also making gains in the Muslim-majority east and Malaiyaha-dominated centre. The traditional poles of Sri Lankan politics - the centre-left, Sinhala nationalist SLFP / SJB and the centre-right, socially liberal UNP / NDF, as well as Tamil nationalist parties that often supported the UNP, lost seats.